


Minor Insecurities

by taylortot



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:06:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5194997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylortot/pseuds/taylortot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ladybug is desperate to keep her personal life separate from her crime-fighting partner, but its hard sometimes. There's so much more behind the mask than a simple identity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minor Insecurities

**Author's Note:**

> Ehhh mostly I just wrote this to finish something. I'm desperate to write more miraculous fanfic but I am finding it difficult to make it happen. Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and I hope its not too. . .gross lol.

“Your hair is longer now.”

Instinctively, Ladybug reaches up to touch the ends of her pigtail. She doesn’t have to reach back very far, Chat is right. The ends drape over her black-spotted shoulder.  Her fingers run through them measuredly and then she turns to glance at him.

“What about it?” she asks, confused by his sudden turn in topic.

He kicks his feet back and forth over the edge of the rooftop, flashing her a charming grin. “I was just making an observation, my lady,” he informs her smoothly. “Do you ever wear your hair down?”

She turns her gaze away from that grin of his and casts her eyes out over the quiet street below. Her chest feels tight, squeezing under the weight of his presence as he seems to take his sweet time observing the length of her hair in conjunction to her shoulders, her neck, her jaw line. She feels him like he’s touching her, even though his hands rest firmly against the roof on either side of his hips.

“No,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Why not?”

She chances a peek to the side to see him genuinely interested and shrugs. “I just don’t like the way I look with my hair down.” It’s typical for him to rebut her self-depreciating statements (as few and far between as they are while she’s Ladybug) with something overly flirtatious, but a sober expression cross his face at her factual response.

Ladybug reaches up to fiddle with the ends of her ponytail again, unnerved again by the heaviness of his eyes. A shiver crawls up her spine like a whisper when he scoots closer to her on the ledge of the roof. His gloved hand bumps against hers, and while she can’t feel the heat of his skin, her stomach flips anyway.

“You would look good with every hairstyle, Ladybug,” he says absolutely. She can’t tell if he’s flirting or if he’s being genuine but either way it makes her feel breathless and she wants him to stop. “You’re very pretty.”

She laughs, and it helps to break the building tension between them. It’s obvious that she’s purposefully putting space between them when she leans back and rests her head against the steeped side of the roof, staring up at the black sky. “You terrible flirt of a cat! You don’t even know what I look like under the mask.”

He grins at her from over his shoulder, and even though it’s dark, the warm, golden haze of the Paris nightlife glows against his pale hair. His eyes pierce through the shadows and pin her down, despite the open, easy-going expression he wears. “I know you have blue eyes. _Freckles_ , my lady, you have freckles. How can that not make you beautiful?”

She eyes him. “So you have a thing for freckles?”

His gaze turns a bit more playful. “Spots, actually.”

Ladybug rolls her eyes. “Freckles and blue eyes have nothing to do with my hair.” Its more than just her hair, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to tell Chat about her plethora of other insecurities that are much bigger than her hairstyle. That would be such a Marinette thing to do.

There’s a quiet moment before he responds. “I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I am even more handsome without the mask,” Chat begins cheerily, but there is an underlying current of something dark in his voice. “And while everyone else loves my face, I don’t care too much for it.”

Their eyes meet in a speculative gaze. Ladybug tries not to ever let curiosity about Chat’s personal life bleed into her mind, but when he puts it out in front of her like that, she can’t help but wonder. It makes sense, since she can read the reluctance in his body posture every time they have to say goodbye. She figured it out a while ago that he enjoys being Chat Noir. At first she’d just written it off as thinking it was because he liked to tease her so much. But now, unable to read the expression on his face, she finds herself believing that she is only a small part of a much larger picture.

There’s so much more to what he’s trying to tell her than she can comprehend, and it feels heavy. She wants to understand almost as much as she doesn’t. It’s undeniable that she wants to be his friend, but how far can that kind of relationship go when she’s determined to keep him from discovering that she’s nothing but shy, clumsy, forgetful Marinette?

“That’s a shame,” she says light-heartedly, after several moments of silence. “It’s a good face.”

He lays down beside her, smirking. “If you think so, then I might be inclined to reconsider.”

She hums and searches the sky for the brightest stars. “I’ll never say anything nice about you again if you can’t take a compliment with grace. Don’t go getting a big ego about it, kitty.”

“In that case, thank you, my lady,” he nearly purrs. When she glances at him from the corner of her eye, she sees that he’s also staring up into the night. It nags at her, that he can’t be honest with her. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because she won’t allow him to. His expression right now doesn’t look at all flirty and self-satisfied. He’s trying, but she can see the cracks and fissures that threaten to break him.

Instinctively, she reaches for his hand, where it lies beside her and curls her fingers against his palm. Chat starts unexpectedly, turning his face so that he can see her as she turns her gaze back to the sky.

“Just because we can’t talk about our personal lives,” she says, “doesn’t mean you have to pretend like you’re alright.”

There’s a note of wry amusement in his voice as he links his fingers through hers. “I could say the same thing to you, you know.”

“It’s just hair,” she hedges.

“You’re lying,” he observes easily, “but that’s okay.” The sounds of Paris fill the space between them now, and his hand is warm against hers. Burning through the tight material of her ladybug suit. For a long time, neither of them say anything.

Chat rubs circles on the back of her hand with his thumb, and she knows that she should pull away. She shouldn’t have initiated contact like this in the first place - she doesn’t want to lead him on when her heart belongs to Adrien - but she can’t bring herself to untangle her hand until a tiny beep shatters the quiet between them.

She reluctantly peels herself away as she sits up and glances down at him. He’s smiling and its a different expression than one he usually wears. It’s softer. It makes her ache to lay back next to him where she could stay Ladybug forever.

“I guess I’ll see you later, kitty cat,” she says simply.

He sits up now, too. “I’ll be counting down the hours, my lady.” She lets him take her hand back in his grip and bring it up to his mouth, kissing her knuckles tenderly. Ladybug lingers a moment and then with a last smile at her partner, she leaps to her feet and takes off across the rooftops.

* * *

 

The next morning, Marinette finds herself attracting the stares of her classmates. She winces away from the gazes, cursing herself for doing something so stupid. What kind of impulse was this anyway? She never wore her hair down. It made her look boxy, made her feel clumsy and even more out of place than usual.

But. . .Chat had made her want to try it. He’d said she was beautiful. And even though she knew she had to take his compliments with a grain of salt, he’d looked so genuine that she had to believe him. It was a horrible mistake, she thinks bitterly, embarrassed as she hurries to her seat. She’ll never trust anything that cat says ever again.

She can feel even Alya staring at her. Alya, who has seen Marinette’s hair down plenty of times during sleepovers. “Whoa, girl, you’re - “

Marinette blushes and drops into her seat, trying hard to ignore the fact that Adrien has turned around in his seat to look at her, that Chloe’s eyes cut into her from clear across the room. “I know, _I know_ ,” Marinette mutters, reaching up to tug at the ends of her hair.

Alya smiles. “It’s pretty. You can rock the down-do, Marinette.”

Marinette snorts at that and opens her mouth to _insist_ that Alya is lying when Adrien speaks. He’d been in her peripheral vision the whole time but now her undivided attention snaps to him as her face ignites in a furious blush.

“Your hair looks nice today, Marinette,” he says kindly, smiling perfectly and beautifully. 

The next time she sees Chat, she’s going to kiss him.

“U-uh thanks! Adrien, you like nice today too. I-I mean your hair! Your hair looks nice, um. Too.” She licks her lips, resisting the urge to disappear into thin air out of embarrassment for her babbling.

She dies a little bit when his smile widens. There’s something warm about his luck-green gaze that reminds her of someone she knows, but she can’t place it. “Thank you.”

Her answering smile is nervous, but she can feel herself glowing. 

All this because of a silly cat. She'll kiss him twice.


End file.
